'No excuse for these problems'

President Barack Obama on Monday tossed aside months of messaging about how easy it would be to sign up for health care under his signature law and sought to remind Americans that the Affordable Care Act has benefits far beyond the chance to apply for insurance online.

And he urged Americans not to give up on Obamacare, even if they were frustrated by HealthCare.gov.

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Standing in the Rose Garden three weeks into the rocky launch, Obama lamented the difficulties with the Obamacare website, while ticking through the law’s benefits that don’t rely on online sign-ups.

“Yes, the website really stank for the first week,” Obama read from a letter he’d received from someone who applied for coverage.

Obama’s new pitch is the health care law itself is “working just fine.” It just has a balky website that needs to be fixed — and will be fixed, he said.

“Nobody is madder than me about the fact that the website isn’t working as well as it should, which means it’s going to get fixed,” Obama said.

Much of Obama’s pitch centered on the guts of the law, rather than its online front door. He said there was no “sugarcoating” the tech problems, but he predicted that people will be patient in order to access health care they wouldn’t otherwise get.

“The essence of the law, the health insurance that’s available to people is working just fine,” Obama said. “The problem has been that the website that’s supposed to make it easy to apply for insurance hasn’t been working. The website has been too slow, people have been getting stuck during the application process.”

Obama said he has called for a “tech surge” to get HealthCare.gov running up to speed. He again advertised the government’s toll-free phone number as a way people can sign up while HealthCare.gov does not function as promised.

“I want the cash registers to work, I want the checkout lines to be smooth and I want people to be able to get this great product,” Obama said. “There’s no excuse for these problems. These problems are getting fixed.”

Obama made a direct pitch to his Democratic supporters in Congress and elsewhere. He sought to remind them that his fight for health care — going on five years now — was to extend affordable health benefits to Americans who hadn’t had them. That’s a goal Democrats had pursued for decades.

“With the website not working as well as it needs to work, that makes a lot of supporters nervous,” Obama said. “But we did not wage this long and contentious battle just around a website. That’s not what this was about.”

Obama called the website’s well-documented errors “unacceptable” and tried to assure the American public that a crack team of technical experts is working around the clock to do what shouldn’t be so remarkable in 2013: build a functioning website.

The timing of Obama’s health care event, three weeks after the law’s disappointing launch, is an acknowledgement that the administration can’t maintain its Obamacare bunker mentality much longer. With the government shutdown and near-fiscal calamity now off the front pages, Obamacare opponents are primed to highlight all the law’s stumbles, starting with a congressional hearing this week.